the hypothetical wren

…the blandest quarter design ever.

New Mexico needs to do a better job when it gets its turn in a few years.

I apologize, once again, for the lack of content herein. The Internet connection at the house I am staying at is unbearably slow, so I haven’t had a whole lot of enthusiasm for blogging in the last week or so, because by the time the "post" page loads, I’ve lost interest in whatever it was that I once had to say.

As I wrote earlier, I started back at my old job last week. All I really have to say about that is that I now find it unbelievable that I actually worked here for five years. I have been here four whole days and I am bored out of my mind. I don’t care all that much about the work that I am doing, and am finding it difficult to concentrate on the tasks at hand. It doesn’t help that most of the things I have to do are more or less monkey work: a lot of small tasks that don’t take up a lot of time. I like having bigger projects to work on, ones that I can kind of lose myself in for a few hours.

This place has changed quite a bit since I left. It was changing a lot while I was here, but it seems that since I left, work of the type that I was originally hired to do is now nonexistent. I was hired to be a technical editor and proofreader, with occasional tech-writing duties. As time progressed, and the focus of the company shifted from research to providing scientific services for larger clients, I got more and more involved in project management. I kept track of what was going on with any one well or drill pad, what data needed to go where, where that data was coming from, and was eventually responsible for compiling reports (this is where my writing and editing skills came back in) about each project.

Anyway, the focus of the company has shifted once again since I left last August. Now we’re just a conduit for data coming from the field to the client. There’s no real analysis of the data going on here anymore. We just type it up and send it out. So my job right now consists mainly of entering and proofreading numbers, and I am not entirely happy with that. What I’m doing at the moment is making sure that various spreadsheets look alike, that they have the same headers and type size and whatnot. This is the only thing I have to do today. I already asked for more work, since this really doesn’t take a long time to do. However, there is no more work, and I’m not really supposed to leave early, so I’m spreading the work out.

I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me here (has a year in academia rendered me worthless for any sort of other job?) or the work. What annoys me most is that a) I was led to believe that there would be a lot more editing work this summer and b) I have so much thesis work to do right now, and I could be doing that instead of this. Oh well.

Having problems finding Grape Nuts? Tinotopia explains Why The Grocery Store Is Always Out Of Things. There’s also a poat on the grammar of ordering coffee.

I am at work. On Sunday afternoon on Memorial Day weekend. I am cranky. This should be self-explanatory.

Content in here has been scarce lately, I know. I’ve been swamped with research or working this week, so my enthusiasm for outside brain work has been lacking.

(If you emailed me and haven’t received a reply, this explanation applies, as well.)

Perhaps this weekend will be better.

Tiny houses!. I like tiny, but these are perhaps too small…